Cisco Makes Major Enterprise Video Push

By CIOinsight |
Posted 11-16-2010

Cisco Systems is continuing to aggressively expand its video collaboration offerings, including making all of its enteprise endpoints video-enabled. Cisco's announcement, made Nov. 15 as the company kicked off its Collaboration 2010 Summit in Phoenix, was among a host of announcements the networking giant is making. The bulk of these are around the rapid growth of video use by consumers and enterprises alike.

Cisco executives also announced new TelePresence endpoints that will help expand the immersive technology to smaller systems, which will enable it to reach more users and move it down into the SMB space. In addition, Cisco is bringing high-quality video to its WebEx collaboration offering and is rolling out a service that will let service providers more easily offer TelePresence to their customers.

Cisco executives have been talking for more than a year about the dramatic shift they see underway as consumers and businesses rapidly adopt video in their communications. They say that about half of all Internet traffic currently is video-based, and expect that number to jump to 90 percent by 2013.

In addition to making all of its endpoints video-enabled, Cisco rolled out the TelePresence EX60 and TelePresence System 500 32-inch endpoints, both of which offer businesses smaller footprints and lower prices than their predecessors. The CTS-32 is a pedestal-based endpoint aimed at executives who are looking for an immersive video experience in their own offices.

Cisco also is putting higher quality video into its WebEx Meeting Center collaboration platform. Among the improvements, which will be available later this quarter, are the ability to share desktops simultaneously and to connect to TelePresence meetings through Cisco's WebEx One Touch feature. WebEx users also will be able to view all the participants in a strip along the bottom of the screen, thanks to Cisco's ActivePresence technology.